Hard Light Productions Forums
General FreeSpace => FreeSpace Discussion => Topic started by: fahdlan on October 27, 2006, 10:56:25 am
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Hi gents,
the common doctrine for space war seems to put a heavy weight on beam armed ships with the figthers using a mix of beams and rockets.
So battleships have no long-range weapons and rely on the fighters.
Is there a way to arm a ship (eg. a destroyer) with ship-killing missiles or create a 'missile-ship'?
I`d just love that.
The tactical idea behind this is that there is no way for a battleship to force an enemy ship into battle if it hasn`t the legs to outrun it.
best regards,
fadhlan
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CAp-Miss sytems are in the Saga mod, and all you eed to do really is copy the helios' entry and edit it, make it a cap weapon and make it long range + big damage :D
bye bye !! *off to pub*
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Copy that, Colonel. :)
I`ll try that!
BTW: have fun :)
fahdlan
*finally sick of fredding fs2/retail*
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Heh, for all the graphics prettiness, I still think one of the greatest upgrades to Freespace 2 is the amount of flexibility that is being added to the Engine ;)
Fredding in SCP adds a whole wealth of options, even importing backgrounds from other missions has made the process 5 times faster ;)
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Yeah, i think i especially love:
- 'randomizing missions' so that re-start/replay won`t create exactly the same situations.
- having achieved or missed results or decisions influence following campaign missions (eg: failing to destroy the pirate flagship resulting in a couple of sudden raids later - and (re)adding the opportunity to get the position of the pirates homebase to wipe them out)
The completely linear (or even worse: binary) story telling is imho something of the past... today i`d like to see just a story line with many different pathes meandering - when they rejoin the storyline, you will have forgotten that there is one :)
I really HATE it beeing able to look through the fog of war just because i`ve failed the mission a couple of times.... :)
BTW:
"Take the universe and grind it up into it's smallest pieces, sieve it with the finest sieve, and bring to me one atom of Justice, one molecule of Truth....and yet you believe in them as though they were solid things, it's amazing.'"
i think i`ve read that line in a novel from terry pratchet, but can`t remember which one?
Well - even if it`s not from TP, i`ll still go with the hard-boiled egg :) (TP: nightwatch)
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*looks around*
Oh you guys have got to be kidding!
:welcome:
I don't have any cool welcoming speeches so the solitary beam will have to do for now. You know, I've always wondered about that myself. I think it would be kind of cool to recreated a space battle according to David Weber. Of course, Weber's battles have the ships doing extremely precisely executed maneuvers with the ships traveling at speeds fractional to the speed of light. Missiles are launched something like tens of thousands of kilometers out, and beam engagements don't usually occur until the ships are within several thousand kilometers and no closer than a few hundred. Even with Weber's Super Dreadnoughts, probably larger than a Shivan Juggernaut, they're so distant from each other even at "close range" beam engagements that the enemy ships are not even visible to the naked eye. This would not make a fun space shooter, but it would be an awesome space stategy game if you make the ships "appear" bigger on a tactical display.
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*stunned by beam* :)
"I think it would be kind of cool to recreated a space battle according to David Weber."
Yess!(with additional 's' and '!') So, theres another 'honoverse'-guy out there?
I`m currently porting my SF2/SP 'silesia' campaign to SF-Open....
The sf_open fred gives me the freedom to make it the way i want :)
I`ve also a couple of single player missions to port - like basilisk I, II, hancock station (still struggling with the minefield), grayson (defendending against the saladin) and such - i think fred_open has the tools to make this work.
I especially like the possible combination of lac`s = fighters in combination with missile armed capitalships, hence my starting question :)
And it would be just great to have a pilot really start from a carrier....
If there are 'honorverse' - people out there I`d just love to work with them to create something like a 'harrington' campaign (or just a set of individual missions set up in the honorverse.).
fahdlan
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Well, I would think that capital ship missiles would be fairly obsolete in the Freespace universe (looking forward to it in the Saga mod though). Any warhead would be shot down -long- before impact. Even bombers have to fly in really close before firing torpedoes just to ensure they're not shot down (and sometimes they are anyway). To my knowledge, even during the Terran-Vasudan War there was no emphasis at all on long-range warheads being used as offensive weaponry on capital ships.
But yea, it should be possible to use them :-). I just don't think they'd ever hit anything. Prove me wrong though!
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"Take the universe and grind it up into it's smallest pieces, sieve it with the finest sieve, and bring to me one atom of Justice, one molecule of Truth....and yet you believe in them as though they were solid things, it's amazing.'"
i think i`ve read that line in a novel from terry pratchet, but can`t remember which one?
Well - even if it`s not from TP, i`ll still go with the hard-boiled egg (TP: nightwatch)
Yup, forgot to put the reference at the end, it's from Reaper Man :) I'll add that :)
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Well, I would think that capital ship missiles would be fairly obsolete in the Freespace universe (looking forward to it in the Saga mod though). Any warhead would be shot down -long- before impact. Even bombers have to fly in really close before firing torpedoes just to ensure they're not shot down (and sometimes they are anyway). To my knowledge, even during the Terran-Vasudan War there was no emphasis at all on long-range warheads being used as offensive weaponry on capital ships.
But yea, it should be possible to use them :-). I just don't think they'd ever hit anything. Prove me wrong though!
Well, of course it wouldn't be possible with conventional warheads armed on GTVA bombers.
Of course, the GTVA could build a light strike cruiser that's sole purpose is to launch warheads. Hmm, that just gave me an idea.
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Of course, the GTVA could build a light strike cruiser that's sole purpose is to launch warheads.
Sounds like Aldo's Njord cruiser. :yes:
Those type of ships would be cool in a line-of-battle formation where each one launches their warheads to send a wall of torpedoes towards a much larger target. The torpedo could be modified to fly a lot faster, at the expense of payload.
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Yep, and missiles designed for capship launch would allow more freedom in their design, as size isn't such a problem.
One could even think of inventing some sort of advanced launch system for speed gains.
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Slightly evasive torp can be quite easily made by using the 'corkscrew' option... Very mild rotation. Also missiles can be set to fly from the turrets in straight angles and then after the launch to turn towards the target and the time it flies straight can also be set.
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Well, I would think that capital ship missiles would be fairly obsolete in the Freespace universe (looking forward to it in the Saga mod though). Any warhead would be shot down -long- before impact.
We're talking about two different systems, though. David Weber's battles are all in Einsteinian physics. The battles are usually fought at sub-light speeds, but at very fast sub-light speeds. We're talking significant fractions of lightspeed. Also, capships in the Honorverse travel in enormous task forces, so we're rarely talking about one solitary Super Dreadnought here. Additionally, missiles are not fired one at a time, but in salvos, from numerous missile batteries. So one Super Dreadnought would fire hundreds of missiles simultaneously. Most of these would still be shot down or evaded using advanced Electronic Warfare techniques we don't see in the game. However any that get through are devastating.
The typical missile contained a nuclear warhead that when exploded, directed its energy to one end of the warhead and concentrated the energy into a laser beam. Depending on the type of explosion, more specifically the energy released, the laser could be an X-ray laser, or an even more devastating Gamma Ray laser, or graser. Rarely, the missiles are actually plain nuclear warheads. What powers all vessels in the honorverse is an impeller which forms a gravemetric plane above and below the vessel, this includes missiles. These planes are impervious to all weapons, but they can be closed by sidewalls which are like shields. These sidewalls can lessen the damage of the lasers but are still devastating nonetheless. There are no impact missiles in the Honorverse.
Missiles are used because battles between fleets take place several light minutes distant from eachother. So conventional weapons are useless at that range. Once fleets become several light seconds distant they actually use regular broadside mounted beam weapons such as X-ray lasers and Grasers. Ship-to-ship battles of this sort are devastating.
In the Honoverse, there are small craft called Light Attack Craft or LACs that function as fighters, bombers, and interceptors. Typical battles in the Honorverse are too large for Fred to handle, dealing with thousands of LAC's, hundreds of small warships, and several dozen large warships, such as the Superdreadnoughts. In addition the physics would have to be redesigned. This is a plausible space strategy game, but I can't see it in the FS universe.
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Tangentially related, but this reminded me of the relativistic warheads. I believe they were mentioned in the context of orbital bombardment.
Basically, fly at relativistic speeds towards your target, then push out some 'warheads' (Say large cones of rock or alumimium or something similarly cheap) and fly away. The velocity alone gives these projectiles so much kinetic energy that when they smack into the planet... Boom.
Not sure how applicable that is in combat, though.
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I would love to see large fast-moving bright projectiles, rather than beams. Beams are cool, but they get old. Railguns never get old.
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How about the standard laser turrets on the cap ships in FS2?
Totally 100% useless, and they're ugly to boot.
Really, someone should mod up the game to create an alternate weapon system for these, a la the shivans with beams mod for FS1port
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How about the standard laser turrets on the cap ships in FS2?
Totally 100% useless, and they're ugly to boot.
Really, someone should mod up the game to create an alternate weapon system for these, a la the shivans with beams mod for FS1port
Hehe you shold see mine and Saga's AAA turrets... their a real pain in the butt when your the target
Don't need no beam guns that slowly fire only once every minute or so... :P
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How about the standard laser turrets on the cap ships in FS2?
Totally 100% useless, and they're ugly to boot.
Really, someone should mod up the game to create an alternate weapon system for these, a la the shivans with beams mod for FS1port
Thing with the blobs is they need to be in large numbers to be of any use unlike FS2 where even big ships only have a few.
I use to always think blobs were rubbish untill I played Silent Threat and saw the Hades and the Fenris (Leviathan ?) broadsiding one another, with a **** load of blobs in between. I was like "woah, that looks ace"
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I would love to see large fast-moving bright projectiles, rather than beams. Beams are cool, but they get old. Railguns never get old.
David Weber has that in the Honorverse, as well as other sci-fi series he does. He calls them HVW, or Hyper-velocity Weapons. Each projectile is the size of a standard bullet, but travels at fractions of lightspeed so when it hits the target, explosions on the order of a small nuclear device ensue. These aren't used for ship-to-ship battles, though, only for orbital bombardment. He also has versions of hand guns that run off the same principle. They're called bead pistols or rifles, or flechette guns. These send projectiles the size of very small bead or darts at very high velocity. The impact is so great that if it hits your pinky you're dead, if you're not wearing any armor, because it'll rip the whole side of your upper torso off along with your pinky, arm and everything.
Basically, if you guys want to see how space battles are really done, read David Weber.
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Thing with the blobs is they need to be in large numbers to be of any use unlike FS2 where even big ships only have a few.
I use to always think blobs were rubbish untill I played Silent Threat and saw the Hades and the Fenris (Leviathan ?) broadsiding one another, with a **** load of blobs in between. I was like "woah, that looks ace"
You cna increase range and refire rate for the laser turrets.
Just double it and suddenlty a Fenris becomes a nightmare.
I even made gattling turrets and those are worse than AAAf. They shoot down bombs like cazy and can wear you down in a instant.
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Freespace combat is designed to be fun to play, not very realistic. Capital ships risking themselves by exposing themselves to beam broadsides and bomber oversaturation attacks is even dumber than today's CVBGs doing so.
They could use kinetic weaponry at long range. They could use active missiles and time them to arrive at target at large swarms (this is not unheard of even in 1960s). They could stay as far away as to make single-person ships too prone for countermeasures and AA fire (what's the point of limiting the range of AA fire anyways? You could give it range as long as you like if you can deal with the recoil..). Why would small ships try to get so close to each other that debris from exploding ships could seriously damage the winner of the fight? Whe would bombers use short-range medium-punch tactics when they could just tack engines on both the bomber and warhead? Where are decoys? Where are warhead evasive manouvers? Why does all combat take place in very low-relativity velocities? Why do fighter fly in straight lines? Why don't they tack fighter weapons into turrets, giving them insane fire rate with apparently very little energy cost (think HL-7)? And so on.
Freespace is World War II in space. It's not realistic, because if it were it would be really, really boring and short arcade.
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Well make fighters faster/better shielded. Let them get in, do damage and get out of range quickly.
Also the HL-7 turrets... thats not a bad idea.. its got good refire, but low damage. Also setting fov to help it miss the target wouldn't hurt. When you can putter around an enemy capship, somethings very wrong then.